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| French President Emmanuel Macron |
Italian Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte said on Thursday a draft EU accord on migration had been withdrawn after he clashed with Chancellor Angela Merkel over an issue that is splitting Europe.
French President Emmanuel Macron said populism was spreading across Europe like a disease that Europeans should fight more vigorously instead of criticising the actions of pro-European governments like his.
Italy’s anti-establishment leaders, clearly assuming Macron was referring to them, hit back by dismissing the 40-year-old French president as a “chatterbox” and accusing him of hypocrisy in his stance over immigration.
Macron has come under pressure at home for not accepting the Aquarius migrant ship that far-right Italian Interior Minister Matteo Salvini turned away from Italian ports, prompting a war of words between Paris and Rome.
On a visit to Brittany, a particularly pro-Europe region, Macron urged commentators to fight those who “hate Europe” rather than attacking him.
“You can see them rise a bit like a leprosy all across Europe, in countries where we thought that would be impossible to see them again, in neighbouring countries,” Macron said.
“They’re saying the worst things, and we’re getting used to it. They’re making provocations, and nobody is horrified by that,” he added, without mentioning Italy or anybody else.
Italian Deputy Prime Minister Luigi Di Maio, head of the 5-Star Movement which governs with Salvini’s League party, called Macron’s words “offensive and out of place”.
“The real leprosy is the hypocrisy of someone who pushes back immigrants at (Italian-French border town) Ventimiglia and then wants to preach to us about our sacrosanct right to ask for an equal distribution of migrants,” Di Maio tweeted.
Salvini also took to Twitter to dismiss Macron as a “chatterbox,” saying that while the French president talked, he was “working to block the trafficking of illegal immigrants in the Mediterranean.”
“There are those who talk and those who act,” Salvini said.
The row between Paris and Rome over the fate of the Aquarius, a ship with more than 600 migrants aboard, including women and children, drew in Pope Francis and sewed division across Europe, straining German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s fragile coalition.
Italy’s EU Affairs Minister Paolo Savona chimed in with Di Maio and Salvini, saying those who “arrogantly and contemptuously” brand the League and 5-Star as populist fail to understand what is happening in Italian and European politics.
Meanwhile the leaders of four central European states, confirmed they would boycott an EU mini-summit on migration, taking a veiled swipe at Merkel by accusing countries of pushing the issue for domestic political reasons.
The withdrawn declaration had been drafted ahead of an emergency meeting of 10 EU leaders set for Sunday in Brussels, with Germany and France hoping for a swift deal that could be approved at a full EU summit at the end of next week.
It contained key elements Merkel needs to placate her rebellious coalition partner, the Bavaria-based Christian Social Union (CSU) and its head, Horst Seehofer, who is also Germany’s interior minister.
But Rome objected to provisions that said asylum seekers would have to be returned to the EU country they had first logged their claim in, which often means Italy.
Rome has taken in some 650,000 boat migrants over the past five years, stoking anti-immigration sentiment in Italy and fueling the rise of the far-right League, which forged a coalition government this month.
Conte, who had threatened not to go to Brussels on Sunday unless the draft was amended, spoke to Merkel on Thursday.
“The chancellor clarified that there had been a ‘misunderstanding’. The draft text released yesterday will be shelved,” Conte wrote on Facebook, adding that he would now go to Brussels at the weekend.
Berlin played down the dispute. “We are in constructive talks with Italy. The meeting on Sunday has only preparatory character,” a German government source said.
Italian authorities appeared to relent on Thursday after at first refusing to accept 226 migrants on board a German rescue ship, saying later in the day they would take them in but impound the vessel.
Salvini initially said the Dutch-flagged Lifeline should take the people it had plucked from the Mediterranean to the Netherlands, not Italy.
But transport minister Danilo Toninelli, who oversees the coastguard, later said it was unsafe for the 32-metre vessel to travel so far with so many people on board.
EU states have been at loggerheads over migration since arrivals spiked in 2015, when more than one million migrants reached its shores across the Mediterranean. There have been 41,000 sea arrivals so far this year, data shows.
Most are in coastal states of arrival like Italy and Greece, or rich destination states like Germany and Sweden, where governments have felt heat from voters over the new arrivals.
EU states to the east are refusing to take migrants in. Hungary’s nationalist Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Thursday hosted a meeting of the “Visegrad 4” former Communist countries, with the leaders of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The four confirmed they would not attend the Sunday talks.
“We understand there are domestic political difficulties in some countries but that cannot lead to pan-European haste,” Orban said.
“We understand that there will … be a mini-summit on Sunday but we would like to state clearly that the prime ministers of V4 agreed that they will not go to that.”
Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said the four states spoke “with one voice” on the migrant issue. “Let’s just say we don’t belong to this migrant-loving group of friends, and neither do we want to partake,” he said.
Unless all EU states agree at their looming June 28-29 summit to share out asylum seekers more evenly, Seehofer has threatened to introduce an entry ban on the German border for all those who have already registered for asylum elsewhere.
Merkel opposes that idea as it would require rigid checks on the EU’s mostly open internal borders. Many would see such checks as reversing a key success story of European integration.
Hence, she asked other EU states to hold extra talks this Sunday and agree to do more on migration in the hope that would be enough to convince Seehofer not to go it alone.
With an eye on further curbing arrivals, the bloc’s top migration official, Dimitris Avramopoulos, said separately on Thursday EU states should make asylum assistance uniform to discourage refugees from moving between member states.
He said the EU should also work more with Africa, tighten borders further and explore setting up bases outside its territory where it would decide on asylum requests before claimants make it to EU soil, and hold them there if they were rejected.
Critics have long said such a plan could violate international humanitarian law. But Avramopoulos said such bases would not be “Guantanamo Bay for migrants”, in a reference to the widely-condemned U.S. detention centre in Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, set up to hold terrorism suspects.
